705/It's a Niche.

It's a Niche.
Date of Scene:	30 May 2017
Location:	Barker Island, North Hempstead
Synopsis:	Summary needed
Cast of Characters:	343, Raven

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Tempest (343) has posed:
Tempest is overseeing the construction of the tower. The good part is that it's constructed in large part with Atlantean tech. The bad part is, that it's constructed in large part by Atlanteans. Which means that there's only so much time that people can work out of water. Or they have to use water suits to even go up on dry land at all. The other thing is that Atlantean construction usually makes good use of the water as a support element. Which means that there's a lot of extra construction needed to ensure the Tower is built up to specs that can handle the super powerful people that it will be housing.

Fortunately, they build fast regardless. The tower is mostly built already though it still has that slightly unfinished quality to it and a good veneer to hide the technology within it. Tempest is overseeing the construction as well, hands on in just about everything which also helps because he is... very, very, strong. And can fly. He's also been using magic to help as well but the construction crew seems to be winding down for the night judging by the portal that Tempest holds open, wide enough for the construction equipment and vehicles to head back to Poseidonis. It's not easy holding a portal that large for that long, at least not for him, as the effort has him straining while people clear out for the night.

Raven has posed:
    Raven's been watching for some time, remotely, hidden in some bushes on the mainland with a pair of binoculars. If she's going to approach Tempest, she wants it to happen when he's alone. She doesn't know how he knew about people chasing her, but this scene presents a perfect opportunity: if he stops sending people through his portal at her approach, then she'll know he's part of the Church and needs to be treated like an enemy. She steps out of the bushes and lifts into the air, zipping across the bay toward Titan Tower, low and close to the water to avoid catching the light. She times her approach so there should only be three Atlanteans left when she touches down on the shore. "Tempest," she greets, from thirty feet back, voice ever creaky. She walks toward him as nonchalantly as is possible when you're as tightly wound as she is.

Tempest (343) has posed:
It takes a lot of concentration but the arrival of another isn't enough to break it at least. Tempest continues holding the portal open, the portal edges swirling with blue and red energy to define it's borders. On the other side of the portal can be seen odd buildings, strange lights, and the occasional merfolk swimming to help with the adjustments and Atlanteans getting out of their water suits. Looking over towards the new arrival Tempest smiles easily, eyes a little tight from the magical strain, "Hey Raven." He greets in friendly tone, "Give me a few here, got to get these people home for the night. It's a heck of a commute." He chuckles at his own joke and then says, "Feel free to take a look around. It's pretty bare bones though, just the floorplan is done. Once we get the core of the tower completed I'm going to hire a surface company for the finish."

Raven has posed:
    Hm. It's very difficult to prove a negative--how can she be sure Tempest isn't of the Church? He could just think he's powerful enough to take her on his own--but there comes a point after which caution is paranoia. Okay, then. Time to let it go for a while.
    Wordlessly, too absorbed in her own thoughts to be polite, Raven drifts over to the tower to look down at it. Yep, that...sure is a building, alright.

Tempest (343) has posed:
Fortunately Atlanteans are pretty rigid in structure and culture so it doesn't take long before they have efficiently left the premises with their equipment (Can't let it fall into air-breather hands after all). Tempest lets the portal close and then wipes his brow a bit, relaxing and shaking his limbs out, primarily his hands and arms. It's definitely tiring, "I know it's all in my head but that is more exhausting than swimming across the pacific in under an hour..." He smiles and then looks over towards Raven. "If you want you can start laying down your first layer of wards while the building is still open, build them into the room itself, or working together we could do the whole tower."

Raven has posed:
    Raven floats back down Garthward. "Alright. I know how to resonate with Atlantean magic. You get started, and I'll chime in once I have a feel for your energy patterns. Or do you need a minute?"

Tempest (343) has posed:
Tempest smiles, "A minute would be nice. I also planned to actually put them into the framework as well. Ground them through physical reinforcement but I didn't want to get started before I spoke with you." It's then that he looks concerned, "I also didn't want to accidentally put something up that would make it hard for you to get in or make you uncomfortable. It'd also help to know what kind of demons we were warding against." He says conversationally, "It's a big multiverse so while I could do general dimensional wards, knowing where to start would make them most effective." He gestures towards the tower, "I also figured to do them in layers because it's a big building and that way if one get's breached there are multiple floors to fall back and give us time to prepare or weaken enemies."

Raven has posed:
    "Don't talk about that," Raven snaps harshly, wheeling on Tempest. "Don't even think about it. That kind of information has a psychic resonance to it. People who are looking for it can find you by it. THINGS that are looking for you can find you by it." She's leaning forward, aggressively, chin up, hands made into fists. Her face, or at least as much of it as can be seen through the permanent shadow of her cloak, is tense, stern, angry. Which probably means she's scared.

Tempest (343) has posed:
"I'm just trying to help here Raven." Garth says, lifting his hands up palms forwards in an 'I give up' sort of gesture, "I can't help if I don't know what I am helping /with/. Anything more focused will be stronger than something general..." He rakes a hand through his hair, "Look Raven. I'm not asking for your secrets. You don't want to tell me, that's fine, I get it, I know we just met. I know you can't just trust me but tell me what to do and I'll do it. Especially if it makes us all safer." He smiles grimly, "I know what it's like though, even just unlocking my magic potential free'd a force of darkness that would have consumed all the life on the planet or worse if we hadn't been able to lock it away." He pauses, "Help me, help you." then he blinks, "Wait, that was a line from a cheesy old movie Arthur made me watch. Ugh." He wrinkles his nose.

Raven has posed:
    "You're trying to help me and I'm trying to keep you alive," Raven says, not quite snapping but not exactly placated either. "Some knowledge is inherently corrupting. So I'm telling you, for your own good, for the sake of everyone around you, don't think about it. Wall it off in your mind. If you have any discipline at all, you can do it."

Tempest (343) has posed:
"I understand." Garth says softly, meeing her not quite snappyness with calm and empathy... which might not make it any better. "I tell you what. Do you think you can do a layer of your own and then I can do a layer outside of that. If anything gets past mine, it'll probably be keyed to yours so yours will be stronger against it than mine would be." He tries an almost shy smile, "Fair? That way I won't get corrupted anymore than I already am."

Raven has posed:
    Raven turns her back on Tempest, and there's a moment as she gathers herself before saying in her normal, flat tone, "That's a good suggestion." From her, that almost counts as conciliatory. "It's too late to stop the corruption now anyway, so just guard your mind and try not to talk about it with anyone who doesn't already know." With that, she floats over to the lowest level of the tower she can reach and hovers there in a meditative pose for a few minutes, voice silent but hands and arms contorting in the alien, ritual postures necessary to channel the energy that soon fires upward in a black column to engulf the tower, to sear every girder with black anti-light that carves bizarre, ugly, squiggly lines of glowing darkness into the faces of the support beams; the letters spiders must use in their written language. The display is immense, but brief. The black column vanishes after only ten seconds, and the... runes, if you want to call them that... vanish two seconds later.

Tempest (343) has posed:
Garth is a little surprised by the speed in which Raven goes about starting up her meditations and preparations before setting in her warding but when he notices she is gather power and starting to contort herself he quickly turns away and gathers up power as his own. A thick deep fog rises up... everywhere, completely encircling the tower and cutting off all outside sight of what might be going on down below, even satellite imagery wouldn't get through due to the temperature of the fog he's summoned so that by the time the display of dark energy and their crazy runes is in process of happening it's shielded from any accidental outside exposure as best he can on short notice.

When he feels the power ebb from Raven's warding Garth focuses himself as well gathering his own energy in a calm mantra of thought and gesture that has the fog he'd summoned twisting, coalescing, and a white-blue aura of power surrounds his hands. Turning he shapes the fog into ice and sends it lancing into the base of the tower and the ice grows forming ancient runes of power the likes that Atlan himself taught him. The ice scores into the tower and etches symbols into it's structure.

While not as brute force powerful as Raven's working it's complexity making it take extreme finesse and concentration as he layers each floor one by one providing multiple backups and barriers each leaving ice permanently etched into the structure but set carefully so as to not touch Raven's work. Finally in a surge of power he wraps the whole tower in a warding, covering the whole tower in ice that then turns to misty fog and sinks into it. After all the work Garth's done today he sits down with a thump, elbows on his knees and face in his hands, rubbing at it as violet energy bleeds from his eyes and through his fingers.

Raven has posed:
    Raven's power is certainly dark--it's all in black, after all!--but it is not easily identifiable. If one were to take the time to scrutinize it carefully, it would appear as an amalgamation of at least three sources (or styles; in magic, the difference between the two blurs) into something all her own. Spiritualists, right? Always gotta be idiosyncratic. If every painting is a self-portrait, then that's twice as true of every spell, and a person can learn a lot about her from watching that display: dark, without subtlety, rising from the earth to the sky... and powerful.
    Just as Raven has some ideas about Garth, by the time his spell is done. His world is in his magic, after all. She glances over his work without bothering to pay too much attention; she already knows what she needs to know. She stands before him, looking down, not offering him a hand up, just asking instead, "So no more portals for you for a while?"

Tempest (343) has posed:
"It's tiring... holding it all in." Garth answers as he manages to stop the violet light from leaking through his fingers and regain control. He rubs his eyes a few times and then blinks, looking up at her. "It's like, trying to stop the Niagra Falls with your bare hands. Controlling it all, and letting out just enough to do what I want it to is mentally tiring." He rests his forearms on his knees and takes a breath, exhaling slowly, and then comes up to his feet easily. "I've only been doing this a few years, my time. Alternate dimensional training and all that." He looks down and smiles a little sadly at some memory or another but then looks back up to meet the violet eyes of the girl in front of him if she's willing. "Bigger things are easier than small tightly controlled things... but you probably know all about it already."

Raven has posed:
    Raven doesn't shrug, but her voice sounds like a shrug as she says, "Atlantean magic is supposed to be like that, yeah. You try to pick up a tremendous weight and throw it at your target. For me, it's more like letting go of a weight and watching it fall where I want it."

Tempest (343) has posed:
"Usually." Garth agrees, "I spent a year at the school studying in Poseidonis as well but.. the way they do things it's like they're /reaching/ for it, and for me it's /always there/." He taps his temple lightly, "It wants to get out, it wants to do stuff, be wild so reigning it in is the hard part. I could open another portal, sure, but I might not be able to control where it goes to, or how big it would get. It's just an endless flow of power and I'm it's doorway into the world." He smiles a little, "So instead of trying to pick up the weight and throw it, more as trying to stop the ocean from touching the seabed and allowing only a trickle." He wrinkles his nose, "Made a lot of people at the school angry though, I could tell how hard it was for some of them to even grasp at it."

Raven has posed:
    Again, Raven doesn't shrug. "Some people aren't cut out for it. Some are." She doesn't seem terribly sympathetic to the people who aren't, but only because she isn't. If you're not good at a dangerous thing, then you need to stop doing it.

Tempest (343) has posed:
Garth hmmms neither agreeing nor disagreeing, just thoughtful for a few moments and also maybe trying to figure out what to say. Eventually he rubs at the back of his head with his right hand and asks, "Are you hungry?" And just to make sure he's fully invested in putting his foot into his mouth to the full heel, "Want to go get a bite to eat?" He asks, "Can change into civvies if you want to avoid attention."

Raven has posed:
    Raven shakes her head. "I'm tired. I need time to meditate." She doesn't look tired; her back is straight and her head is up. Maybe it's a psychic tiredness. "Another time, when we're both more fresh."

Tempest (343) has posed:
Psychic tiredness is something Garth can appreciate, being pretty drained himself. "I'd like that." He says softly with a smile, "Let me know if there's anything special you'd like in the tower as well ok? I'll do my best to get it done."